Richard Hall welcomed visitor Tim Williston.

Doug Stahl told the story about how his home computer got infected with a virus or worm and the steps he had to take to clean it.

The members discussed spyware programs. Richard demoed the MS Anti-Spyware and Webroot programs. Mike Sheehan asked the Richard copy the Beta MS software in his 2 GB thumb drive with cable. The members discussed that hardware.

Richard told the group that he had deleted two pictures from his digital camera card by accident. He told them that he had searched CNet for freeware that would allow him to recover the files and he said he also looked for CNet recommendations and user comments. He found the two programs from the same vendor:

Smart Recovery (for media cards) http://www. pcinspector.de/smart_media_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

and

PC Inspector 4.0 for HDD partitions http://www.pcinspe ctor.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

Richard demoed how the Smart Recovery program recovered some of the pictures on the Sony Memory Stick card, but he was not able to bring all of the pictures back because they had been overwritten by newer pictures he had taken.

Richard and David Henry reviewed how the Hosts file works. They discussed how a robust Host file added another layer of protection against phishing sites and fraudulent web pages. Kim's article was reviewed at http://www.komando.com/tips_show.asp?showID=8510 .

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